Business technologies have evolved rapidly over the past decade. Tom Merritt views five of the best business platforms of the 2010s.
Top 5 most influential business platforms of the decade
Business technologies have evolved rapidly over the past decade. Tom Merritt views five of the best business platforms of the 2010s.
Your business platform was probably entirely in-house. Some people thought the internal platform was synonymous with the company. That is what makes the switch to business platform providers so impressive. After the last decade, most companies would probably answer the question of which business platform they use with a kind of sentence related to the word cloud. Let’s look at some of the top five business platforms of the past decade.
SEE: More decade in reporting (TechRepublic on Flipboard)
- Office 365: The shift from Microsoft as a company sometimes seems best illustrated by Office; instead of sending copies in boxes, Microsoft now prefers a service, and Office 365 is the most visible way to do that. Large and small companies do not think about always having the latest version of Office for an easily budgetable annual fee.
- Payment platforms: Stripe went from a dongle for an iPhone to a payment platform that performs all the hippest point-of-sale activities you see. PayPal goes back to the decade before, but is now one of the largest invoice processors and, via Venmo, a popular way for service technicians to get paid – I even paid for my chimney sweep with Venmo. It has never been easier to find out how you can pay or be paid online.
- YouTube: Think about it – of course there are makers and influencers who build entire millions of companies on YouTube. But almost every company that you can think of also has a YouTube channel for marketing, training or even service and support needs.
- Sales team: SAP is also doing well in this space, but Salesforce dominates. According to Gartner, SAP had 8.3% of the CRM market in 2018 and Salesforce had 19.5%. This child of the dotcom era has gone from a revolution in CRM to offering an entire suite to help you with customer service, marketing automation, analysis and application development.
- AWS and Azure: I know it’s a cheat, but despite different ways to get there, these two are often mentioned in the same breath as being synonymous with the cloud. Both services have changed the fate of their parent companies in the last decade. And don’t forget that AWS and Azure are over the decade at the head of a government contract. Cloud has definitely arrived this decade.
There are many more platforms than I can fit in five slots – even if I cheat there and slide in two at the end.
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